I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
SAM HARRISI know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
SAM HARRISReligious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
SAM HARRISWe have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That’s it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper.
SAM HARRISThe freedom to think out loud on certain topics, without fear of being hounded into hiding or killed, has already been lost.
SAM HARRISThe power of psychedelics is that they often reveal, in the span of a few hours, depths of awe and understanding that can otherwise elude us for a lifetime.
SAM HARRISThe core of science is not a mathematical modeling–it is intellectual honesty. It is a willingness to have our certainties about the world constrained by good evidence and good argument.
SAM HARRISHow can we be “free” as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.
SAM HARRISScience, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world.
SAM HARRISThe difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments , and a passionate unwillingness to do so.
SAM HARRISChristians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a thelogically defensible reading of the Bible.
SAM HARRISPeople who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.
SAM HARRISTheology is ignorance with wings.
SAM HARRISThis is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions, what only lunatics could believe on their own.
SAM HARRISWhen considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.
SAM HARRISThe problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
SAM HARRISLying is, almost by definition, a refusal to cooperate with others. It condenses a lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single act. It is both a failure of understanding and an unwillingness to be understood. To lie is to recoil from relationship.
SAM HARRIS